Porch Pirates
Common Definition
Porch Pirates are defined as:
- (n) one or more people who enter onto a private residence with the goal of stealing newly delivered packages that have not yet been physically secured by the owner[1].
- (n) thieves who swipe packages from Amazon and other companies from doorsteps[2].
Description
A Porch Pirate can be anyone. On average, they live in close proximity to areas of exploitation, for example within two miles of target neighborhoods. Some people believe that this is an opportunistic crime, but this is usually untrue.
Typically Porch Pirates are organized criminals working in groups of 2-4 people. They follow delivery trucks, learning the timing of the drivers, and collect the packages when the recipient is not there to receive the delivery, which has been left on the front porch by the worker. The most usual time of the theft happens between the morning and early afternoon hours of 9AM-2PM. Presumably, this is the time when homeowners are at work.
Porch Pirates are targeting private people rather than retail stores, driven by a drastic increase in mobile shopping and online purchases, which has led to an increase in home deliveries and low-risk or no-risk opportunities. Authorities describe this as a growing problem affecting 23 million Americans in 2015 and 26 million in 2016[3].
In recent years, retail theft has become such an expensive problem, with estimated losses of $48.9 billion in 2016[4]. Retail stores have responded by making large investments into security measures to reduce theft, with expanded and upgraded security cameras, surveillance systems, and scaled-up loss prevention (LP) teams working to catch thieves in the act. While this has worked to push out thieves, these same groups, in cooperation, have changed their sights to unaware targets[5]. It is a momentum shift that moved the risk and the thieves out of shopping centers and into neighborhoods everywhere to pick up the unguarded, unwatched, and unsecured newly arrived purchases sitting on the doorstep.
References
- ↑ "You Buy It, We Steal It! - the new wave of crime". DEMARCKO - Protect Yourself. Retrieved 2018-01-01.
- ↑ Wingfield, Nick (2017-12-19). "'Porch Pirates' Steal Holiday Packages as They Pile Up at Homes". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-01-01.
- ↑ "How to Keep Porch Pirates and House Fires From Making Your Holidays Hazardous". insuranceQuotes. Retrieved 2018-01-01.
- ↑ Dr. Richard Hollinger, Bob Moraca (2017). "National Retail Federation - 2017 National Retail Security Survey" (PDF). https://nrf.com. Archived from the original on 2018-08-03. Retrieved 2018-01-01. External link in
|website=(help)CS1 maint: Unfit url (link) - ↑ News, ABC. "Video: Suspects caught on camera stealing holiday packages". ABC News. Retrieved 2018-01-01.
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